From the Cathedral of St. Stephen, Metz, France
THROUGH A GLASS, DIMLY
On Sunday, I shared with the congregation about my favorite exhibit at the Parliament of World Religions in Salt Lake City in October. It was called “Remembered Light: Glass Fragments from World War II.” I walked through and learned all about Rev. Fred McDonald, who served as an army Chaplain during WWII and collected glass fragments during and after the war. Rev. McDonald made a point of visiting churches throughout Europe while he was there. Many of those churches had sustained significant damage from Nazi air raids. Whenever he visited these churches, he picked up some shards of glass from the broken stained glass windows, put them in an envelope, and labeled the envelope with the location and date. He didn’t really have a plan to do anything with them, but they were too important to him to throw away, so they sat in a cardboard box for 55 years!
Then one evening in 1999—just 3 years before he died—he was sitting around a dinner table with friends and he told them about the glass. And they were amazed! One of those friends contacted Armelle LeRoux, a renowned stained glass artist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and brought Rev. McDonald to meet with her. As it turned out, Rev. McDonald had a story for each of the locations where he collected the shards of glass.
Soon an idea was born! Armelle would work with some of the best glass artists in the country and create works of art using the glass shards. Each work of art would tell the story of a unique location in Europe where Rev. McDonald visited nearly 6 decades earlier. Each window would use new glass as well as some of the shards from Rev. McDonald. Some of the windows were created with just a few shards; and some had dozens.
One of my favorite examples was the crown of thorns (above) created with glass from the Cathedral of St. Stephen in Metz, France. The artist later recalled that when she first touched them, “They felt to me like thorns.” And so, she used them to create a crown of thorns—33 broken shards of glass from St. Stephen’s, symbolizing the 33 years of Jesus’ life. She placed them in such a way so that the light would shine through the crown of thorns, stating: “We can destroy the glass, but not the light.”
The Apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13, “For now, we see through a glass dimly.” I suggested to the congregation that in two important ways, we ARE the glass. First of all, God’s light shines through us; how well we allow the light to shine through is up to us…and it might require some “window cleaning.” Secondly, we all experience brokenness in our lives in one way or another; and yet, there is always hope that God can partner with us to gather together the broken pieces, clean them off, perhaps rearrange them, and allow the light of God’s love to shine through with clarity and exquisite beauty.
May you feel the light of God’s love today!
Aloha nui loa!
Kahu Alan Akana
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